scarcity

Saturday, half full

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I’ve always struggled with Saturdays.

Before you heckle me, hear me out—

Saturdays are plenty. I’m much more familiar with scarcity, which is evident on Friday nights and Sundays. But Saturdays are big and long, and that is somehow upsetting.

There is something languid, in a kind of nauseous way, about a Saturday. A Saturday at home is sunlight coming in hot through the window, still wearing pajamas at 11 and unable to change them because what is the next activity after all?, strange lunch (the strangest of meals no matter what, but stranger still at home on a Saturday), sitting in different positions across uncertain hours, then suddenly it’s 4:30 and a tiny whiny cloud of despair rains down. Where did all the lovely wide-open time go?

Activity-laden Saturdays are different: a kind of frenetic energy, hours that bend in strange directions, and a million possibilities of how to be a human. Couples carrying coffees around corners, women with totes full of farmer’s market goods, parking lots at the base of hills laden with hikers, restaurant patios full of people sharing appetizers, roads bearing shoppers destined to return that piece of hardware that didn’t quite work to the mega-mall, and lots of unseen people writing books or learning the clarinet or enjoying lots of Premium Content or cooking complicated meals for very interesting friends in their homes, and no matter which of these or infinite other activities one chooses, it often feels like it wasn’t quite the right one, or it was too short, or on the other hand it took far too long and now the whole lovely time is gone.

A few years ago I went through a solitary period. The phrase a great and terrible freedom bounced around my head a lot. Too many possibilities can become a cage if you let them.

Saturdays, for those (like me) with few real responsibilities, are a little microcosm of that great and terrible freedom.

I’ve heard that how you feel on a Monday is a clear view into how you feel about your life. But how you feel about a Saturday is, too. Monday shows how you feel about the yang in your life—what are you striving for? What is the weight of all your doings? How does that feel? But Saturdays show you how you feel about the yin—what does resting feel like? What does open time feel like? Who are you? What does being you feel like?

So if Saturdays often feel mildly depressing to me, one thing must be true: my relationship to yin needs help.

I’ve been thinking a lot about, for lack of a better way to put this, chilling out. This blog went quiet over the last few weeks of vacation as I tried to do less, be more. Say a gentle “no thanks” to the unspoken demand to justify my existence with proof that I do a lot, am busy, am important, am productive, am probably going to miraculously cheat death by having a lot to show for 2020. Resisting this means learning how to trust that, to paraphrase Jesus, tomorrow is tomorrow’s concern. Today’s trouble is enough for today. I don’t need to stay awake at night worrying how I’ll get all those things done that I crave doing.

After all, if I get them done but feel irritated by lovely wide-open luxurious free time that begins at the finish line, that’s…not ideal.

Here’s the irony: when I’m busy, I long for unstructured time. O, for a wide-open Saturday! My kingdom for a week without evening obligations! But then it happens and I go all lopsided. It turns out that I don’t naturally leap out of bed, exercise post-haste, then spend six uninterrupted hours writing a flawless segment of Book Three.

So here I am, on Saturday, sitting in the cool by my plants, in that wide-open time between Friday and Sunday. I didn’t Do much yet except a bit of yoga, dumping out the compost, building some flat-pack furniture, and quite possibly breaking a door.

I might Do Something after this. Perhaps better not.

On fumes

/ thepsychopomp / 1 Comment

It often feels like am ruled by inertia: if I’m lying down on the couch, it takes a superhuman amount of effort to change that. I’ll stay buried under the blanket until an actual emergency looms.

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But once I get rolling, God help you if you try to stop me. Interruptions—stopping here or there for this or that—feel like unbearable dams in the river of everything that is happening and must happen now now now.

Okay, I admit it: I’m looking for excuses for how I let the car run out of gas.

We’ve been driving around a lot to see the scenery. The gauge got below half, below a third. “I should get gas soon,” I thought, then forgot. Eventually it was below a quarter. “Remind me to get gas,” I told him, rather unfairly. I forgot. So did he.

And neither of us realized that after we went over that hill, there would just be…no gas…at all…for miles and miles, as the gas light came on and the gauge ticked down from four bars, to three, to two.

Nine miles later, a town sparkled at the base of a hill we’d just crested, lying against the bed of the ocean. “There will be gas there,” I said.

“Hope so,” he said.

I snorted, said something rather rude about how a town is hardly a town without a single gas station.

There was no gas station.

Down to one bar.

Thirteen miles to the next town, said the road sign.

Sweat broke out on his forehead.

I tossed my shoulders back and said we could make it all the way to our destination if we wanted, no problem. “You always have fifty miles after the light goes on, everyone knows that.”

“I thought it was twenty.”

Sweat broke out on my forehead.

What may have been thirteen miles later felt like about fifty. Every little tremble and rumble and wheeze of the car felt like the last breath of an empty tank. Our phones lied about having service: we couldn’t get any information to load. All there was to do was press on forward, through breathtaking countryside where we might very well be camping out tonight with no service and an inert vehicle, hoping that eventually there would be a town and that it would be the proper kind of town with at least one gas station.

We got to that thirteen-miles-away town approximately twenty-one miles later (I have verified against Google Maps). No gas. I felt like I was going to puke. We’d been at one bar for so long.

You go to worst-case-scenario planning so fast when you’re in a bad-case scenario. And yet it was and will forever remain imaginary, because we’ll never now know whether anyone would have stopped and helped us by letting us use their magically operable phone, or by driving ahead to the next town and bringing back a fuel can of gas to get us going. It would be night not too long from now. Would we have to walk miles along the winding, dark, shoulderless road?

I wondered whether this feeling was like the one that precedes a panic attack, which is not helpful when you’re driving. He started breathing differently. I apologized, which he accepted graciously, but like they say, the best apology is changed behavior, and I could hardly start filling up promptly at this point where there were no actual gas stations, I mean, honestly.

Through it all I had this sense that we’d make it, which was not supported by evidence, but which stuck with me. Something will happen. It just has to. There will be a town, eventually, with a gas station. It doesn’t make sense that there won’t be.

And, readers, there was. Two or five or some odd miles after the town we’d been aiming for, there was a gas station. It was crowded, because I imagine everyone else, like us, was fully in scarcity mode by the time they saw it. We filled up. We began breathing better, and we had a nice long verbal processing session about the whole thing.

I wondered aloud, probably too soon, whether this would be the kind of story we could laugh about soon, the time we wound around the wild coastline on fumes, the time we almost accidentally camped overnight in the national park. I vowed to become the kind of person who fills up between a quarter and a half tank. Call it a third-quarter resolution.